Ravi Kannan from Microsoft Research India will present the ACO Distinghished Lecture on November 1, 2011 at 4:30 pm in Klaus 1116. The lecture is focused on vectors, sampling, and massive data in algorithmic and linear algebra as used as a toolkit in Computer Science.

Ravindran (Ravi) Kannan is Principal Researcher in the Algorithms Research Group at Microsoft Research Bangalore. Previously he was a professor at CMU, MIT, and Yale, where he was the William Lanman Professor of Computer Science. His research areas span Algorithms, Optimization and Probability. He is widely known for introducing several groundbreaking techniques in theoretical computer science, notably in the algorithmic geometry of numbers, sampling and volume computation in high dimension, and algorithmic linear algebra. He received the Knuth Prize in 2011, and the Fulkerson Prize in 1992. He is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Bombay.